Go-Jek saw bookings explode 100-fold last year

A Go-Jek driver with passenger. Photo credit: Go-Jek.

Indonesia’s homegrown motorcycle ride-hailing stalwart Go-Jek launched its app in January 2015 and within a few months it was raking in millions of downloads and bookings.

By now, you’d think that growth would have somewhat plateaued or slowed down – but that’s not the case.

“Since May 2015 to June this year – in 13 months – we’ve grown about 100 times,” Aakash Dharmadhikari, Go-Jek’s chief product officer, tells the audience at Tech in Asia Bangalore 2016. “It’s crazy. I’ve never seen anything like that in my life.”

Go-Jek CPO Aakash Dharmadhikari speaks at the TIA Bangalore 2016 conference.

Aakash co-founded India-based app builder C42, which started to work on the Go-Jek app on a consultancy basis in May last year, then was acquired by Go-Jek in September.

Every night, Aakash’s team would tweak the app, perform some fixes to scale it, and demand would come instantly, Aakash recalled with much enthusiasm.

Yet that rocket-fast growth is both Go-Jek’s pride and its enormous challenge.

Bugs aplenty

Before Aakash’s team fully went on board, Go-Jek often experienced glitches. Drivers and passengers would complain about frozen bookings and rides that couldn’t be canceled. A programmer even identified security flaws in the motorcycle app – bugs in the system would allow hackers to manipulate the earnings of Go-Jek’s partners and access personal information such as the phone numbers and emails of its drivers and users.

The app later on evolved to include other services like grocery shopping, ticket booking.

That’s the reason Go-Jek acquired Aakash’s company and a second firm called CodeIgnition, which is also based out of India. Go-Jek founder Nadiem Makarim earlier told Tech in Asia that the demand for the app during the early months was just too much for the startup’s tech team to handle.

So the Indians rewrote a lot of Go-Jek’s code in order to make it more efficient.

But even Aakash’s team is struggling to catch up.

No magic